> Scientism has become the state religion and companies are paying for indulgences.
I was unfamiliar with that term and googled it: it's described as "excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques". I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset.
In an ideal world, I would absolutely prefer my government to make decisions based on facts and methods of finding out more facts. Currently, that's only one small part of our governmental decision making process, with the other notable parts being powerful special interests and public opinion.
Could you elaborate a bit on what exactly you meant by this?
I'm not who you replied to, but I've experienced this with some of my friends.
Some people believe in science. They don't take the facts and understand them, they just say "Science says this is true. Anyone who disagrees needs to be shouted down." They will shame people for expressing any doubt against a "scientific consensus". This is actually the opposite of science.
For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, even though science itself hasn't moved it into that category. If you dare to suggest that there might be some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism for gravity, they will literally get louder and louder until you stop arguing. They won't provide any evidence, they'll just keep saying the same thing over and over.
And it happens for this that are much less certain, too.
I think scientism is best summed up as the fallacious idea that science is a priesthood rather than a process. Some people really struggle separating the politically neutral idea of using the scientific method to inform policy with the politically charged idea that a scientific technocracy is a desirable state of affairs in my opinion, a problem that's only got worse in recent years.
Science is a powerful contributor to the sum of human knowledge, but it's absolutely not the only pillar of human knowledge and there's a lot of people who think that scientific advancement means we can just do away with philosophy, politics, and other fields like that altogether, as though one day with the right equations all of ethics or culture is just going to pop out of physics. These people don't just throw the baby but the whole nursery out with the bathwater in my opinion!
Thank you for answering. I agree that "scientific consensus" is an elusive thing in practice: interpretations change, new data comes in, sometimes it turns out data was held back or falsified. On top of that, what is consensus and what isn't is often distorted in the public view. There is no established quorum process (which is a good thing).
> For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, even though science itself hasn't moved it into that category. If you dare to suggest that there might be some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism for gravity
There is no scientific consensus on the mechanism that is causing gravity, at least not on the level you suggest. There is consensus on how gravity behaves, in regimes we can currently observe.
The problem with suggesting "some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism" is that you can generate arbitrary many such mechanisms, because there aren't good options yet for experimental corroboration. We all have favorite ideas for how gravity might work behind the scenes, and it absolutely is fun to speculate. But if your goal is to actually make a contribution, your need to come up with an idea that can be falsified.
In my opinion you are completely within your rights to make claims that contradict empirical findings or theoretical frameworks. There often are holes in our knowledge, and continuously re-examining established science is absolutely part of the process. Of course, the burden of proof is on you in that case. But science is absolutely meant to be a living process.
> Some people believe in science. [...] This is actually the opposite of science.
Adding to this, belief in science actually means believing in the _process_ of scientific discovery, i.e. believing that _eventually_ the "truth" will be discovered.
As you correctly point out, questioning the current consensus is a fundamental part of the process, but not all challenges to scientific knowledge are legitimate. Many (most?) concerns you hear in the mainstream media are not legitimate but based on logical fallacies, strawmen, ad hominem attacks, etc. I found this list [1] quite useful to guard against such unfounded attacks.
I don't think science is about "the truth", as the scientific process shouldn't allow definitive claims. Rather, there should always be an understanding that whatever is being said comes with a probability of being true. We can make a prediction and assign a likelihood the prediction will be accurate, but we can never say "this is the truth" using the scientific method. There are going to be things that are so close to true that they can be taken at face value, but science doesn't determine what that level is, that's a personal decision. It's up to the individual to determine what they accept as truth given the data they have, including nonscientific sources of information, such as expert opinion. Science has to reject expert opinion as a source of information, and yet the individual ( including scientists when not performing science) must accept expert opinion in order to live their lives.
Since is not about finding "the truth" as you put it, but it is about finding the current, most fitting truth. As circumstances change "the truth" also changes, as such science will never be able to find anything but "the current best bet".
The idea that science is about finding the "less wrong", rather than the absolute truth, is actually fairly recent, only really becoming mainstream during the 20th century.
Sure. I just don't think it's accurate to think science comes to a definitive conclusion. It is a process of constant discovery and coming closer and closer to the truth, but will never arrived at a final answer.
> They will shame people for expressing any doubt against a "scientific consensus".
Doubt based on what? This is the classic “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”. The scientific consensus absolutely can be wrong on something, but people that read a few Facebook articles and think they’re argument holds any weight whatsoever deserve to be shamed. You want to question the scientific consensus? Conduct a study or get in a lab, have it peer reviewed. If you want to say “I think the major experts and accumulated understanding in this field are wrong ” then you are going to have to bring more to the table than some random doubts and suggestions.
> For instance, the Theory of Gravity.
Wonderful example. As almost every physicist has stories of people that send them their pet theories about theoretical physics models. Have they done mathematical models? Of course not. But they are sure their theory is going to crack this unifying theory wide open. Maybe ask yourself “if I disagree with all the experts, have they all misunderstood what I am seeing or do I not understand the subject as much as I think I do?” Shame is the cousin to humility.
A law in science isn't used the same as how you are using the word. A law isn't a really good theory. Laws are mathematical predictions based on data collected.
Often it's just an equation that fits some data for a range of values.
Almost all laws are found in the physical sciences. Some examples are: Ohm's Law, Universal Gravitation, Coulomb's law, and Kirchhoff's laws. None of these are perfect descriptions of reality.
"theory" and "law" are synonyms in science. the difference is that a law is a simple one line general statement (F=gMm/r^2) and a theory is fleshed out model with details.
"Theory" does NOT mean "unproven". That's "conjecture".
Gotta ask: is this gravity example real? You really have friends who have some sort of mystical commitment to the idea that gravity is somehow entirely epistemologically self-grounded?
Almost literally every physicist since Newton has believed that there is some sort of underlying theory which explains gravity. Its hard to imagine how anyone could get the idea that the matter was somehow settled.
Most people think we understand gravity better than we actually do.
To compare it to an actual hot-button issue, we know more about the mechanisms of evolution than we do about the mechanisms of gravity.
We know kind of how it behaves at various scales, but we don't know why it does. We don't know what makes gravity. Why do denser objects have more of it. Why is it weaker than other forces, yet felt on larger scales? Does it actually exist or is it an emergent property kind of like the centripetal force (or is it centrifugal, I keep getting those flopped)?
>For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, even though science itself hasn't moved it into that category. If you dare to suggest that there might be some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism for gravity, they will literally get louder and louder until you stop arguing. They won't provide any evidence, they'll just keep saying the same thing over and over.
What a strange example. Has this ever happened to you? Additionally, does General Relativity count as "an underlying mechanism for gravity"?
We have pretty reasonable models for how gravity might work.
A suggestion that there may be a yet undiscovered mechanism for gravity isn't useful to science. It's imaginative perhaps, but without a piece of math, or a suggestion for an experiment by which to test it, it's just science fiction. Ideas are cheap.
Anecdotally, I've seen this too. I think people look for something to believe in, and they take almost everything a celebrity scientist they agree with tweet or share as gospel without much scrutiny of the research. It's ridiculous
As a hypothetical example: "excessive deference to science" might occur when you have a global pandemic, and a government official says, "I am following the science. Therefore an attack on me is an attack on science." This official asks for exciting new emergency powers, and uses them to push through measures which coincidentally achieve policy goals he couldn't achieve before the pandemic. In the name of Science™, he tries to silence any dissent that says his measures are ill-suited to mitigate the pandemic, or unduly burdensome; maybe he even has an excuse to ban opposition political parties, perhaps because they are antivax (eww — but still) or just because they are questioning his power grabs.
(This is a hypothetical government official. Any resemblance to real-world government officials is coincidental.)
That isn’t deference to science. That’s just someone who can align himself to something and use it t to make himself untouchable. You see the sand thing with religion or nationalism. “An attack on me is an attack on our veterans!”
Not all science is good. You can publish papers which literally do not allow any valid conclusions to be drawn due to methodological errors. I suspect that's most of them since academics are judged by the number of papers they've published in impactful journals.
Just because science says something doesn't mean it's true. Truth must be verifiable. It's possible to easily and cheaply verify basic physical concepts like gravity. This inspires trust. Professors routinely reproduce physics in classrooms:
Reproducing some medical experiment is hard, expensive and time consuming. Once a study is published, a huge number of people will simply assume it is true. Very few will actually check the methodology of the study. Virtually none will attempt to reproduce it.
> Just because science says something doesn't mean it's true. Truth must be verifiable.
I don't mean to sound condescending, but if science as a concept 'says' anything, it is exactly that truth must be verifiable.
There absolutely are problems with how study results are weighted. Starting from the way the press reports on findings, up to and including the uncritical acceptance of questionable material by many members of the scientific community.
However, there is no workable alternative to the process of science, because defaulting to whatever people personally like and discarding any inpportune data is certainly not how we move forward as a civilization if we have any ambition to continue our ascent (and we might in fact not have that ambition, but I do like to pretend that we do).
Studies and data in general must be weighted. Sometimes the proper weight is zero. I see little other options but to continue stumbling towards improvement and knowledge. Acting on data will always be an imperfect process on a sliding scale, very few people would disagree with that.
Edit: I would also say that there is a distinction between the opinion that we're generally moving too fast and the opinion that we have severe deficits in how we weigh incoming data. Both of these can be addressed, although the solutions appear to be way easier in the former case. We need to be honest about which camp we're in though.
I want to agree here because this comment seems to be misunderstood.
In science as cumulative evidence, studies can in fact be harmful. If they are wrong or highly ambiguous, or if they make it hard to uncover errors, then they make it more difficult for future research to be correct.
The reasons include publication bias (rejecting studies with null effects and/or contradicting previous literature), p-hacking and so on.
That's why it is so important to apply rigorous standards everywhere: Transparency, data sharing, peer review, replication, pre-registration. In other words: There is no alternative to open science.
On the contrary, truth must be falsifiable [1]. The value of a theory is not in how easy it is to verify, but in how easily it could possibly be refuted.
Science is myopic by construction. Science does not consider what questions to answer, but rather tries to answer what can be answered. Science cannot tell you how to run a country or city. It can, at best, tell you how NOT to.
Over reliance on science as guidance has also lead to some of the darkest chapters of human history, like phrenology and its use to justify racial supremacy.
> Over reliance on science as guidance has also lead to some of the darkest chapters of human history, like phrenology and its use to justify racial supremacy.
Could you clarify this? I understand that humans committed terrible atrocities in the name of "racial supremacy". I also understand that the same people used science as a fig leaf to justify their actions. But you seem to be saying that over reliance on science lead to these atrocities.
I simply can't imagine someone saying "I like these people and normally wouldn't hurt them, but the scientific consensus is so strong therefore I will kill/maim/throw them into a concentration camp." It sounds more likely that the racist ideology was there first, which caused both the racist science and the atrocities both. In other words racist people wanted to commit atrocities and they manufactured excuses for themselves to do so.
But I'm far from an expert on human history, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
I’m not the person you’re replying to (and I agree with your) but thinking about your question the closest thing I could come up with is maybe lobotomies? Even then I’m not really sure about the chicken and the egg. Was it ever about treating the patient or was it meant to make caring for an “embarrassing” patient easier for the family by turning the patient into a shell of a human?
Also, unlike e.g. phrenology, I wouldn't say lobotomies were one of the darkest chapters in the history of mankind. Sorely misguided and tragic, but not that.
Eugenics was a mainstream science for a large part of the 20th century, not just amongst white supremacists, and was often carried out with "good intentions", as opposed to simply being a way to legitimise white supremacist ideologies.
Exactly this. Science has too much emphasis on the "now", on present knowledge.
Take 17th century science... most of it would be ludicrous by any standard today. Now imagine applying that science onto humans/society... Science as a tool to deal with present knowledge, should not be used solely to manage societies or human situations with irreversible consequences.
In your very last sentence there; you summed up what I meant. I don't know why you expect me to come up with a solution on how to manage societies in a comment section.
I don't think they expected you to come up with a solution to managing societies; I assume if you know of a better way to come up with reliable guidelines for running society you wouldn't have thought of it yourself. Maybe you could link to a book that contains the methodology that you think is better than science.
Dude, we (me and other commenter) are already in agreement. Other commenter summed it up pretty succinctly. So I just didn't want to start a flamewar on semantics, except for pointing out that I can't come up with a solution in a short form here.
I have a medium article in draft over 3 months on this exact topic. That's why my wording of the issue came out sounding more complicated. But other commenter saying "science alone" and me saying "using science solely" are basically pointing to same understanding.
There are many examples in history for the said situation leading to social catastrophes; see Malthus (or Thanos' ideology if you like pop-cult), or Darwinian take on managing societies. Some lead to racism, some eugenics etc etc.
Like the original commenter said; science is myopic and highly focused on the present body of knowledge available. But once we applied those results onto people and cause suffering, and 10 years later find some of those were wrong, we can not undo the human suffering.
There needs to be a balance; when science is treading closely to the human dignity, well-being, life in general.
> how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge
You quoted it yourself: scientism is "excessive", or, more correctly, it treats scientists as authoritative sources of truths that should not be questioned. This form of blind trust goes against the scientific method.
Also scientism can make categorical error in the type of questions that can be answered e.g. journalists asking physicists about "god particles" and such
> I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset.
I think the poster refers to dogmatic mindset. Assuming that all religions are dogmatic is incorrect.
Scientism is a term popularised by Hayek that means the fetishisation of the institutions of science and a failure to recognise the role of uncertainty in scientific judgement.
In an ideal world, maybe. In the real world it means treating a study on 31 American undergrads as scripture (the studies that failed to replicate its result go unpublished), regulation based on a study sponsored by the regulated, or a diet recommendation for half a century based on a hypothesis that saturated fat causes heart disease.
This policy by science simply doesn't seem very effective. It largely provides cover for bureaucrats who can say that they followed science while doing what they wanted to do in the first place.
Sorry I missed your reply amongst the other comments.
> In the real world it means treating a study on 31 American undergrads as scripture
My opinion is that scripture shouldn't be treated as scripture to begin with.
> This policy by science simply doesn't seem very effective.
As a tool for making policy decisions, science gives you access to solutions that might work based on the evidence. Now, that evidence may be completely bogus, so there is no getting around the need for evaluation. But saying that data is a bad basis for goal-oriented action planning is a self-defeating position.
Policy by science is not a meaningful concept on its own, policy action requires a component we haven't talked about yet: a value system. Science can give you the data, but your goals determine what actions should follow. You're certainly correct when you say that politicians are getting some cover from improper data, but overall I find they seldomly hide their motivations.
> I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset.
The scientific method doesn't include the word "belief" at all. If you reduce it to belief, it's not science anymore, it's religion.
> In an ideal world, I would absolutely prefer my government to make decisions based on facts and methods of finding out more facts.
Science is a process, not a collection of hard facts. The only hard facts (or the claim of them more accurately) come from religion.
Science concerns itself with building speculative models that have predictive power, and trying to match observation with prediction of the models. Redundancy (peer review) is used to REDUCE (not ELIMINATE) errors. Social and cultural factors can result in false positives and false negatives in peer review.
That's it in a nutshell. The models don't reflect reality, they only reflect an approximation of aspects of reality in given contexts.
Anyway, the problem is that people do have a religious instinct. And when they're incapable of perceiving science with all its subtleties, they simply reduce it to a religion, which requires the belief that it's basically flawless, it provides hard facts, the best solutions, and that it's uniform (and any contradictions are just examples of "interests" corrupting it).
While politics are very corrupted and often result in incompetence rising to the top, even it weren't the case, those competent politicians have no single place to turn to to understand what "science" thinks on any given problem of society. Science isn't a guy, so it has no opinion.
I think scientism relates to beliefs that equate the current state of scientific knowledge with absolute truth and ignoring unknown unknowns and limits of scientific methods like statistics.
A common fallacy is that "absence of evidence is evidence of absence". For a government this might mean "There is no definite scientific evidence that substance X causes cancer, so we do not ban it.".
Should we ban everything until we don't have solid proof that they don't cause cancer? Not banning something isn't acting like the substance is benign, it's acting like we don't know.
There is a middle ground that exists only when you combine science with common sense.
Let's say a chemical X is used in baby food production. There are no studies that show that it is harmful, because no studies have been done yet. Many chemicals with similar structure have been shown to be harmful.
Scientifically speaking you would be correct to say that there is no evidence that chemical X is harmful. There is no way yet to accurately model the interaction of any chemical with your body without any actual experimentation. You can make an argument that chemical X might be harmful because similar chemicals are harmful, but that would not be science.
I would not buy that baby food with chemical X if given a choice. Best case I don't lose.
Finding conclusive evidence in science often takes lots of time to gather enough data because there are so many different variables to consider. So absence of evidence means a lot more when you have been looking for a long time and invested lots of resources.
I don't know what parent meant exactly, but I personally think that scientific methods are only useful for people who are smart/educated enough to interpret them.
There were so many studies for example about cancer along the lines of "eating apples reduces cancer by 5%" and then you see people start eating apples for this reason. Somebody wrote a paper to get a publication with questionable results and people blindly believe in the power of science.
Don't forget that a lot of the papers are also written in unintelligible scientific jargon and that scientists would massage numbers because their writings directly affects their job prospects and salaries.
Religion didn't necessarily start from being a highly politicised power-hungry beast it became in middle ages. Bible says a lot about being a better human being. So is science - the scientific method does allow us to learn new things; but academia is a political entity which is only going to be growing in it's power and thus corruption.
> There were so many studies for example about cancer along the lines of "eating apples reduces cancer by 5%" and then you see people start eating apples for this reason. Somebody wrote a paper to get a publication with questionable results and people blindly believe in the power of science.
This is the problem with interpreting results... you can set up a study witn n=100k people, and find out that people who eat apples die 5% less from cancer, correlation is shown, and somewhere in the conclusion "more research is needed to find exact cause".
In practice, people who eat more fruits probably take care of themselves better, eat better diet,... etc.
I understood the parent as people believieng in something, without actually looking at data itself, thinking about it, considering other posibilities, and of course, declaring others (opposers) as heretics... for example, spring, last year, my government (and our scientists, and probably yours too, depending on where you live) said that masks are useless for fighting covid, even detrimental, so "believers" called the people who bought and wore them fearmongering paranoics.... then a random saturday came, masks became mandatory "from monday on", and those same people called the "antimaskers" conspiracy-theorists and worse for not wanting to wear masks.
Reality is of course a mixed bag... cotton masks prevent you from spitting everywhere, but don't actually block a lot of virus in the air. Surgical masks were practically impossible to buy back then. Masks outside, away from people are useless. etc.
Science is a process for getting better (or less bad) knowledge. Eventually.
I think we all agree that many studies are flawed and/or wrong. But I also think most people agree that there is a realistic expectation that we will find out over time [1]
[1] Caveat emptor: With sensible scientific methods, see my other comment on this post.
Dividing the world into alleged institutions that produce facts, and institutions that don't is exactly what scientism is.
Querying public opinion is a method of determining facts, even special interests provide facts. 'Scientism' consists of what Feyerabend called 'methodological monism', believing in the notion that there is any privileged authority to 'speak facts'.
Someone who properly understands 'science' understands that the processes to produce knowledge are as dynamic as facts themselves. All efforts to produce some sort of privileged methodology produce bureaucracy and standardization that closes science off from avenues that can produce knowledge. Elevating this bureaucratic caste of scientists to political authority is scientism.
The problematic part is not the belief in science but in the absence of good science relying on or outright exploiting the things that resemble science. With bad science and statistics you can justify pretty much anything. When challenged simply say "Ah sorry, the science says so".
The problem is that there's facts and there's facts; if a company basically buys their way into a reputable journal and publishes peer-reviewed papers, are you trusting that as fact? I mean if you religiously believe in science / scientism, you would take the Word of a scientific paper as the Word of God, even if you should do your own research into the sources, citations, reviewers, and who paid for it.
I mean the current slew of flat earthers, anti-vaxxers/maskers, bleach eyeballers andsoforth also cite Science as their source - lending credibility to their arguments, making their thing not just emotional or gut feeling.
And religious people will take (parts of) the bible as a scientific fact as well.
I was unfamiliar with that term and googled it: it's described as "excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques". I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset.
In an ideal world, I would absolutely prefer my government to make decisions based on facts and methods of finding out more facts. Currently, that's only one small part of our governmental decision making process, with the other notable parts being powerful special interests and public opinion.
Could you elaborate a bit on what exactly you meant by this?